THE SWEET SCIENCE OF ATMOSPHERES IN THE FOUR
ZOAS

And all the time in Caverns shut, the golden Looms erected
First spun, then
wove the Atmospheres, there the Spider & Worm
Plied the wingd shuttle
piping shrill thro’ all the list’ning threads
Beneath the
Caverns roll the weights of lead & spindles of iron
The enormous warp
& woof rage direful in the affrighted deep

While far into the
vast unknown, the strong wing’d Eagles bend
Their venturous flight,
in Human forms distinct; thro darkness deep
They bear the woven draperies;
on golden hooks they hang abroad
The universal curtains & spread out
from Sun to Sun
The vehicles of light, they separate the furious
particles
Into mild currents as the water mingles with the wine.

While thus the Spirits of strongest wing enlighten the dark deep
The
threads are spun & the cords twisted & drawn out; then the weak
Begin their work; & many a net is netted; many a net
Spread &
many a Spirit caught, innumerable the nets
Innumerable the gins &
traps; & many a soothing flute
Is form’d & many a corded
lyre, outspread over the immense
In cruel delight they trap the listeners,
& in cruel delight
Bind them, condensing the strong energies into
little compass
Some became seed of every plant that shall be planted;
some
The bulbous roots, thrown up together into barns &
garners

This passage, a type of the cosmogonic moment variously presented by Blake, has
largely been passed over in the silence accorded self-evident meaning, or when
discussed, glided through with such selective paraphrase and assured comment as
to belie any but an undemanding significance.2↤ 2 D. J. Sloss and J. P. R. Wallis remarked in
their edition (speaking specifically of the second verse grouping) that,
“This passage presents some difficulty, if, as elsewhere . . . a
definitely mental significance is to be read into this myth. For it is
impossible to reconcile the intellectual light with the obscurantism denoted
by Urizen himself, and manifested in the creation of his new world. It may
be therefore that the reference is to the light of the sun, not to mental
light”; The Prophetic Writings of William Blake
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1926), I, 180 n. Milton O. Percival states simply that
“The looms weave the spiritual clothing”; while, on the other
hand, “The net of the moral law is beginning to take shape”; William
Blake’s Circle of Destiny (1938; rpt. New
York: Octagon Books, 1970), p. 63. Erdman sees “the caverns of
manufactory” where children are represented by “silkworms”
and spiders, and notes the appearance of Blake’s “favorite
theme, the spinning and twisting by the weak of the ‘gins &
traps’ of Church and State propaganda”; Blake:
Prophet Against Empire, rev. ed. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday,
1969), pp. 335-36. The three sections present a nearly simultaneous temporal unity
(“And all the time. . . . While. . . . While”) strongly grounded in a
sequence of interrelated images, already suggesting to the painstaking reader
that the passage is structured around a coherent underlying meaning.

A first reading reveals that the Atmospheres are woven, spread through space and
then reintroduced as a spirit-catching and spirit-condensing net. In the first
of two brief notes on the passage (E 871), Bloom answers the strangeness of the
“first spun, then wove” Atmospheres with a reference to Paradise Lost
7.241, where God “spun out the Air.” Milton
was only one of the first to use what became a standard and sometimes very
involved eighteenth-century image of the woven “fabric” or
“texture” of air. Blackmore’s popular The
Creation (1712) set the tone: begin page 81 |
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Vala or The Four Zoas, p. 29.
London, British Museum.

begin page 82 |
↑ back to top↤ 3 Richard Blackmore, The
Creation: A Philosophical Poem in Seven Books, in The Works
of the English Poets. with Prefaces, Biographical and
Critical by Samuel Johnson, vol. 24 (London: J. Nichols et al.,
1779).

Remark the air’s transparent element,
Its curious structures,
and its vast extent:
Its wondrous web proclaims the loom divine;
Its threads, the hand that drew them out so fine.
This thin contexture
makes its bosom fit,
Celestial heat and lustre to transmit;

The scientific exactitude of “Atmospheres” calls attention to the
figurative loom in which they were woven. The formula “Looms erected”
recalls an image fifteen lines earlier where the Children of Man, “schools
Erected forming Instruments / To measure out the course of heaven”
(28.20-21).4↤ 4
Night the Second, with half of Blake’s ten uses, is the center for
things “erected”; four pages earlier the Bands of Heaven “the
loom erected” (24.10) next to “golden compasses, the
quadrant” and other technical instruments, and “They erected the
furnaces” (24.13). Shortly after the passage under discussion, the qoal
of all the preceding, “the Altar . . . was Erected”
(30.38-42).
The looms are the schools of
warped thought, an image presented more explicitly in Jerusalem, where

I turn my eyes to the Schools & Universities
of Europe
And there behold the Loom of Locke whose Woof rages
dire

(15.14-15).

The Caverns then, as the site of this mental
manufacture, contain the mind-loom in its perceptual and physical shell.5↤ 5 “Caverns,” moreover, glance at the
received idea that the atmospheres were made underground: “ . . . by
the continual fermentations made in the bowels of the earth there are aerial
substances raised out of all kinds of bodies, all which together make the
atmosphere,” wrote Newton; I. Bernard Cohen, ed., Isaac
Newton’s Papers and Letters On Natural Philosophy and related
documents, assisted by Robert E. Schofield, with explanatory
prefaces by Marie Boas, Charles Coulston Gillispie, Thomas S. Kuhn, and
Perry Miller (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1958), p. 253.
Chamber’s Cyclopedia defined “atmosphere”
as that part of air “which receives vapours and exhalations”
(1751, OED). In Night the Ninth, Urizen and family “pourd their light /
To exhale the spirits of Luvah & Vala thro the atmosphere”
(131.33-34). “Beneath” the caverns is without,
the vast unknown of the unconscious. The Marriage of Heaven and
Hell presents a similar transition: “an Eagle with wings and
feathers of air, he caused the inside of the cave to be infinite” (pl. 15).
This mental space was entered by Er at the end of the Republic
in one of the earliest journeys through the unknown. There he saw “the
light which binds heaven” and, hanging from its extremities, “the
spindle [atraktos] of Necessity” and its “weight” [sphondulos]
(616c ff., cf. Milton 35. 14-15). The “Atmospheres”
offer a later instance of that myth. Ostensibly as natural as the air we
breathe, the “Atmospheres” are in fact woven by “the
Spider,” known for his entrapping web of thought, and the “Worm,”
who otherwise spins the veiling cocoon of “silken thought” (cf. Night
Thoughts, 1.157-58).

The close proximity of the formulaic “wingd shuttle” to the
“wing’d Eagles” intimates that those “Human forms”
are being manipulated by the “Spider” and “Worm,” an
impression strengthened by the fact that the Eagles “bend,” where
those weavers “plied”—a very rare verb for Blake, a significant
meaning of which was “to bend.”6↤ 6 Ply, “bend,” and ply,
“employ,” are distinct verbs; the former, although now rare, rates
an entry half the length of the latter in the OED.
Both shuttle and Eagles are moving back and forth filling up space. These eagles
suggest the great scientists of the century, like Halley and Newton, who, even
in life, were very commonly presented as pursuing extramundane, cosmic voyages
of intellect.7↤ 7 William Powell Jones quotes a number of
examples in his The Rhetoric of Science: A Study of Scientific
Ideas and Imagery in Eighteenth-Century English Poetry (Berkeley
& Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1966), pp. 99-103; see also
Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Newton Demands the Muse:
Newton’s “Opticks” and the Eighteenth Century
Poets, Princeton Paperback (1946; rpt. Princeton: Princeton Univ.
Press, 1966), p. 68. One high point of the tradition is Wordsworth’s
image of Newton as “a mind for ever / Voyaging through strange seas of
Thought, alone” (Prelude 3.62-63). Here
Blake sees them drawing
their threads or theories of aethereal atmosphere behind them—bringing
not light, but darkness visible. This point is confirmed by the application of
the remaining three instances of “venturous” to the spider-scientist
Urizen, whose “dire Web / Followed behind him” (73.31-32)8↤ 8 This web can represent a different aspect of
perceptual entrapment, based on schematic diagrams of the solar
system. in his exploration of the Abyss at the end
of Night the Sixth (also the only Night where “the vast unknown”
reappears):
↤ 9 The variant form describing “the
ventrous feet / Of Urizen” (FZ 125.12-13) associates venturing with
“giving birth” via “venter,” the womb, and the
spectre’s podalic birth (FZ 5.15). “Venturous” also
represents one of Urizen’s many associations with Milton’s
Satan (cf. PL 5.64, 9.690) and his flight through the Abyss.

Creating many a vortex fixing many a Science in the deep
And thence throwing his venturous limbs into the vast unknown

The “woven draperies” they bear must be the woven Atmospheres of
the previous section, now expanded to “The universal curtains” and
“the vehicles of light.” These curtains cannot fail to bring to mind
Urizen’s “woven darkness” in The Song of Los
(7.25) or those created by the Eternals in The Book of Urizen
in order to “bind in the Void” and close the fallen worlds from their
sight:

12. They began to weave curtains of darkness
They erected large
pillars round the Void
With golden hooks fastend in the pillars
With infinite labour the Eternals
A woof wove, and called it
Science

(19.5-9)

This work parallels the Lord’s
instructions to Moses that His temple is to be furnished with pillars and hooks
of gold from which to hang “the vail that shall divide unto you between the
holy place and the most holy” (Ex. 26:32, 33, et al.). In Night the Second
the golden hooks are suns. The woven Atmospheres/curtains which serve also as
“the vehicles of light” suggest Newton’s formulation of
“an ethereal medium, much of the same constitution with air, but far rarer,
subtler, and more strongly elastic” (Cohen, p. 179). The Book
of Los speaks of “Light. . . . conducted by fluid so pure”
(5.10-11).

Atmosphere is both woven and fluid at the same time. Its aethereal nature blends
into “particles” and “currents,” the proper combination of
corpuscular and wave theory: “A ray of light is a continued stream of these
particles.”10↤ 10 “Optics,” Encyclopedia Britannica, vol. III (Edinburgh:
A Bell,
1771).
Water mingling with
wine offers a theoretical illustration similar to that of Grimaldi in his
Physico-Mathesis de Lumine, where “He was led to conclude
that light did not go through diaphanous material by direct penetration but
rather in an indirect manner . . . . like wine in water.”11↤ 11 Vasco Ronchi, The Nature of
Light, An Historical Survey, trans. V. Barocas (London: Heinemann,
1970), p. 135. Note the direction of dilution: the wine of light is
being watered, but water requires spiritual transformation to turn to wine. On
the other hand, this same aethereal atmosphere was seen as being composed of
invisible threads by which light was transmitted. Blackmore explained:

The
ever-rolling Orb’s impulsive Ray
On the next Threads and
Filaments does bear,
Which form the springy Texture of the Air,
.
. . these still strike the next, till to the Sight
The quick Vibration
propagates the Light;

(2.401-05)

Henry Brooke’s Universal Beauty described the air, “Its mantle wove of
elemental threads,” which, invisible, “enfolds the sphere.”12↤ 12 Cited in Nicolson, p. 68. “The various
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twine of light” was untwisted by Newton in Thomson’s famous image
(“Spring,” 211), and Erasmus Darwin speaks simply of “the
sevenfold threads of light.”13↤ 13 The Botanic Garden; A Poem, in Two Parts. Part I containing
The Economy of Vegetation. Part II, The Loves of the Plants. with
Philosophical Notes [10 plates engraved by Blake] (1791; rpt.
Menston, Eng.: Scholar Press, 1973); The Loves of the
Plants, I. 118, p. 10. In The Temple of
Nature (London: J. Johnson, 1803) Darwin was to see in
“threads” an even more basic unit of life:
Last, as fine
goads the glutton-threads excite
Cords grapple cords, and webs
with webs unite;
And quick CONTRACTION with ethereal flame
Lights into life the fibre-woven frame,—
Hence without
parent by spontaneous birth
Rise the first spects of animated
earth;
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Life’s subtle woof in Nature’s loom is wove;

(I.243-48, 252)
This was published, presumably, after Night the
Second was written. Darwin used analogous imagery of the origin of life
from “a simple living filament” in his prose study, Zoonomia; or The
Laws of Organic Life (London: J.
Johnson, 1794), I, 489-98.
The
curtains woven from these imagined threads appear to be diaphanous—just
so the Inhabitants in The Book of Urizen

Discernd not the woven
hipocrisy
But the streaky slime in their
heavens
Brought together by narrowing perceptions
Appeard
transparent air

(25.32-35)

The third section returns to the initial spinning as “The threads are spun
& the cords twisted & drawn out” which the weak, having
“power to resist energy” (MHH 16), make into “many a net.”
The twisted cords offer another evocation of The Book of
Urizen, pl. 25, which describes Urizen’s spider-web (25.10 ff.),
concluding

8. So twisted the cords, & so knotted The meshes: twisted
like to the human brain

9. And all calld it, The Net of
Religion.

(25.20-22)

The nets are identified with the
curtains and Atmospheres, not only being made from the same material (in turn,
“like to the human brain”), but, like the draperies they are
“Spread . . . outspread over the immense.”14↤ 14 Donne saw a different
kind of mental net:
for of Meridians, and
Parallels,
Man hath weav’d out a net, and this net
throwne
Upon the Heavens, and now they are his own.

(“The first Anniversary,” 278-80) Blake draws attention to the luminescent component of
the image by twice repeating in a single line the “cruel delight” of
these activities. The nets of the weak “trap the
listeners” and catch “many a Spirit,” condensing their
“strong energies.” The Spirits caught are evidently those same
“strong wing’d Eagles. . . . spirits of strongest wing” that
originally spread the curtains (now nets), while the trapped listeners are those
“list’ning threads” through which the wingd shuttle plied. So
the spirits are bound in the web they thought to spread and the listeners are
woven into what they heard.

The listeners hear the “chords” of “nature’s harmony,”
like the entrancing unheard musical air of the spheres. At the Wedding Feast of
Nature, Los and Enitharmon “listend to the Elemental Harps & Sphery
Song” (13.1) presented by the “Bright Souls of vegetative life”
(13.24). But in Night the Second the flute and mendacious lyre are instruments
(“schools Erected forming instruments”) playing a seductive,
fallacious harmony. In Night the Fourth Tharmas compells Los to “choose
life”:

And all the Elements shall serve thee to their soothing
flutes
Their sweet inspiriting lyres thy labours shall
administer

(52.3-4)

This single instance of
“inspiriting” indicates that the lyres are to do more than
“uplift moods.” Los must play the lyre to draw spirits into the
furnaces of Urizen he is rebuilding; their bound energy is necessary to fuel his
work of constructing the fallen world.

The passage from Night the Second concludes with the unexpected information that
the spirits are condensed “into little compass / Some became seed of every
plant . . . some / The bulbous roots . . . ” It is a striking conclusion to
the sequence of events that began with the weaving of the Atmospheres. One such
process of condensation was evident in The Book of Los, where
the prophet caught the spiritual light to make the “glowing illusion”
of the mundane sun:

4: And first from those infinite fires
The light
that flow’d down on the winds
He siez’d; beating
incessant, condensing
The subtil particles in an Orb.

(5.27-30)

The illustration shows that sun to be “black but
shining” (SL 8, MHH 18). Urizen reveals in Night the Sixth that when
“death” shuts up his powers, he is “then a seed in the vast womb
of darkness” (73.8-9)—misremembering his ruined furnaces and
“stoned stupor” of Night the Fourth.

It was probably in 1789, at the height of his involvement with The New Jerusalem
Church, that Blake read and extensively annotated Swedenborg’s The Wisdom
of Angels concerning Divine Love and Divine Wisdom
(London: W. Chalklen, 1788). One of the principal motifs of the book is the
descending correspondence running from “the Lord” to the
“spiritual sun” to the “natural sun.” Divine Love and Divine
Wisdom “appear in the spiritual world as a Sun” (no. 83, p. 69) and
from that sun proceed a corresponding “spiritual Heat and spiritual
Light” (no. 290, p. 264).15↤ 15 Cf. “The Little Black Boy”:
Look on the rising sun:
there God does live
And gives his light, and gives his heat
away.

(11. 9-10)
Blake told Crabb Robinson that he
had seen “the Spiritual Sun” on Primrose Hill (G. E. Bentley,
Jr., Blake Records [Oxford: Clarendon, 1969], p.
541).
The
“assertion that the spiritual Sun is not Life” (e.g., according to
Swedenborg it is from the Lord but not the Lord, so “not life in
itself”) annotated Blake, “explains how the natural Sun is dead”
(p. 268). In addition to the Lord’s presenting himself “as to Love
by Heat, as to Wisdom by Light,” Swedenborg adds another correspondence,
that of “use,” presented “by the Atmosphere” (no. 299, p.
271). Atmosphere is invoked because it is “the Continent of Heat and
Light” as Use is “Of Love and Wisdom” (ibid.). Thus the
Atmosphere is the necessary element “by means of” which the Spiritual
Sun “produces the varieties of all Things in the created Universe”
(no. 300, p. 273). There are three Atmospheres in both the Spiritual and Natural
Worlds, which “in descending decrease,” that is, “become
continually more compressed and more inert” until “they are no longer
Atmospheres but Substances” (no. 302, p. 274). Swedenborg reiterates that
“the Substances and Matter, of which Earths consist . . . are, as it were,
the Ends and Terminations of the Atmospheres” (no. 305, p. 277). These
substances, however, still “have brought with them by Continuation from the
Substance of the spiritual Sun that which was there from the Divine” and as
a result continue to manifest “a perpetual Endeavour to produce Forms of
Uses” (no. 310, p. 280). “The
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first
Production of those Earths, when they were still recent, and in their
Simplicity, was the Production of Seeds” (no. 312, p. 283). The Seeds, in
turn, become an “image of creation” moving from their “first
Principles to their Ultimates,” a movement characterized in Blake’s
annotation as “A Going forth & returning” (p. 285), a perception
which underlies his whole work. “This World is too poor to produce one
Seed,” Blake wrote in the margins of Reynold’s Discourses on Art (E
646), and returning to the image in The Four Zoas, we see that the effect of the Atmosphere
is to catch
the Spirits of the Spiritual Sun and condense them into seeds.

Having worked through this involved spiritualist account some may be surprised to
discover that Newton was of the same mind. Indeed it is evident that Swedenborg
adapts material he would surely have come across in his wide scientific reading.
In the “Second Paper on Light and Colours,” not fully printed until
1757 but known since its presentation in 1675,16↤ 16 The relevant material is collected in
Cohen, Newton’s Papers and Letters, etc. The
letter to Oldenburg which emends the paper, and in so doing
recapitulates the idea of condensation, first appeared in Thomas
Birch’s The Works of Robert Boyle in 1744 (I,
74; Cohen, p. 254) and was quickly reprinted in other sources. The
complete paper was first published in Birch’s The
History of the Royal Society of London in 1757 (III, 247-305;
Cohen, pp. 177-235). But the image was well known before; at the
“Academy of Lagado” in Gulliver’s
Travels (1726), “some were condensing Air into a dry
tangible Substance, by extracting the Nitre, and letting the aqueous or
fluid Particles percolate” (Pt. III, ch. 5). Swedenborg’s
Divine Love and Divine Wisdom was first published
in 1763.
Donald Ault seems to have been the first to mention the “Second
Paper” in connection with Blake (Visionary Physics:
Blake’s Response to Newton [Chicago & London: Univ.
of Chicago Press, 1974], pp. 11, 85) though he does not realize its
connection to Swedenborg or to Night the Second. He focuses on the
negative “condensations” of Jerusalem,
suggesting that the void which “shrinks and condenses”
entering objects is directed, “very possibly, against
Newton’s doctrine of solid bodies deriving from condensation of
‘aether’” (p. 85). Newton begins by supposing that the “aethereal medium”
is “compounded, partly of the main phlegmatic body of aether, partly of
other various aethereal spirits, much after the manner, that air is compounded
of the phlegmatic body of air intermixed with various vapours and exhalations:
for the electric and magnetic effluvia, and gravitating principle, seem to argue
such variety” (Cohen, p. 180). Blake knew these “spirits” as
“Devils. . . . Powers of the Air” and remarked, “the air was full
of them, & seemd composed of them” (MHH 18). Newton continues:

Perhaps the whole frame of nature may be nothing but various contextures of
some certain aethereal spirits, or vapours, condensed as it were by
precipitation, much after the manner, that vapours are condensed into water,
or exhalations into grosser substances, though not so easily condensible;
and after condensation wrought into various forms; at first by the immediate
hand of the Creator; and ever since by the power of nature; which, by virtue
of the command, increase and multiply, became a complete imitator of the
copies set her by the protoplast. Thus perhaps may all things be originated
from aether.

(Cohen, p. 180)

In one of the last
“Queries” added to the Opticks Newton limited
himself to suggesting that “The changing of Bodies into Light, and Light
into Bodies, is very conformable to the Course of Nature, which seems delighted
with Transmutations.”17↤ 17 Isaac Newton, Opticks: or A
Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections and Colours of
Light; fore. Albert Einstein; intro. Edmund Whittaker; pref. I.
Bernard Cohen; table of contents, Duane H. D. Roller; based on the 4th ed.,
London, 1730 (New York: Dover, 1952), p. 374. Cf. Ault’s peculiar
remark: “Blake, by taking things spiritual and mental and causing the
Newtonian figures in his myth to condense and contract them into solids, is
in this way criticizing Newton’s doctrine that there could be no such
transformation” (p. 88).

These two accounts may mark the distinction between “Science” and
“Sweet Science” which operates in The Four Zoas.
Newton withheld his idea from publication; “The fact is,” observes E.
A. Burtt, “Newton’s positivism was powerful enough to prevent his
carrying his speculations very far in this direction.”18↤ 18 Edwin Arthur[e] Burtt,
The Metaphysical
Foundations of Modern Physical Science, 2nd ed. rev., Anchor Books
(1932; rpt. Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1954), p. 282. This for Blake is “Science,” the suspension
of belief and emphasis on doubt in the interests of the profitability and
utility of experimental results. Swedenborg, on the other hand, though he
“has not written one new truth” (MHH 22) is a practitioner of the
“Sweet Science” of belief and imaginative relation to the world. The
distinction, ultimately, has to do with the place of man in the scientific
endeavor; for Newton, “Man exists to know and applaud” (Burtt, p. 297)
the order of the God of Nature in His unchanging laws, whereas for Blake the
Imagination is to realize itself as the Being that instituted Nature and
continually bodies forth new creations. The use of the term “Science”
for both endeavors shows that the two will eventually be one.

Both Newton and Swedenborg say that the aethereal condenses in the atmosphere, so
that the physical world is, literally, spiritual. But while
Newton imagines no purpose for the “transmutations,” Blake sees in
Swedenborg a vision of “a going forth & returning,” the
circulating, spiraling, expanding movement of the imagination. At the close of
the atmospheric moment in Night the Second some of the Spirits are shown
condensed into seed to be sown, others condensed into roots, already harvested
and stored in “barns & garners,” the “store house” of
thought (cf. 110[1st]. 12-13). The seeds may be new thoughts—spiritual
energy and enlightenment caught up in an image that will grow and bear—as
the roots may be accomplished thought, the organic base for further visions
which, Blake says, are always of “somewhat on earth.”19↤ 19 Ann.
Lavater, E 590; the single instance of “bulbous” eliminates any
possibility for the frequently negative associations involved with
“roots.” “The Imaginative Image,” writes Blake,
“returns by the seed of contemplative Thought” (VLJ, E 545; cf. J
85.27-29). In The Four Zoas it is the passage through
atmosphere that materializes the image.

Blake reintroduces Swedenborg’s three atmospheres in Night the Seventh
(a). Los builds Golgonooza in “the nether heavens” where “new
heavens & a new Earth” have opened. They are “Threefold within
the brain within the heart within the loins” (87.10) and so represent,
“A Threefold Atmosphere Sublime continuous from Urthonas world”
(87.11) or the second of the threefold atmospheres of Swedenborg’s
Spiritual and Natural Worlds, arranged in the traditional hierarchy of elemental
(loins), celestial (heart), and intellectual (head).20↤ 20 See for example the illustration to
Fludd’s Utriusque cosmi . . . historia reproduced
in S. K. Heninger, Jr., The Cosmographical Glass: Renaissance
Diagrams of the Universe (San Marino, Ca.: Huntington Library,
1977), p. 145. This second, natural Atmosphere has a “Limit
Twofold named Satan & Adam” (87.12), or Opacity (cf. 56.19) and
“Translucence” (87.13, sometimes called “Contraction”).
These two limits were in a sense present in the two aspects of the Atmospheres:
vehicles of light and condensing net. The medium of these two limits is itself
the limit to perception through it. But this atmosphere also provides a
necessary secure space in which to sleep and grow:

And we are put on earth a
little space,
That we may learn to bear the beams of love,

“The Little Black Boy,” 13-14

“The Natural Earth &
Atmosphere,” Blake wrote in his annotations to Divine Love and
Divine Wisdom, “is a Phantasy” (p. 285). The real atmosphere,
to use the metaphor the OED first dates at 1797-1803, is the mental one (s.v.
“atmosphere,” 4). Young agreed: begin page 85 |
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One of the Eternals at their Feast in Night the Ninth describes the netting of
Spirits from the Eternal point of view. When man is wearied, “Folding the
pure wings of his mind . . . Abstracted from the roots of Science
[Nature del.]” (133.14-15), then the Eternals “cast him like
a Seed into the Earth” (133.16). According to The Book of
Ahania, the Spirit is cast “On the Human soul” as “The
Seed of eternal Science” (5.33-34). Toward the end of the Night the golden
looms and wingd shuttle appear for the second time in the poem:

Then Enion
& Ahania & Vala & the wife of Dark Urthona
Rose from the
feast in joy ascending to their Golden Looms
Where the wingd shuttle
Sang the spindle & the distaff & the Reel
Rang sweet the
praise of industry.

(137.11-14)

There they fabricate bodies
for the spectres, the spirits that the Eternal Man casts into “the world of
shadows thro the air” (137.31; cf. 100[1st].2 ff.). The woven atmosphere is
one medium of materialization, one instance of the “wide woof” which
flows from the looms down into the Chasms “where the Nations are gatherd
together” (137.17). These references converge at the end of the poem where
“The Sun has left his blackness” (138.20) and

The sun arises from
his dewy bed & the fresh airs
Play in his smiling beams giving the
seeds of life to grow
And the fresh Earth beams forth ten thousand
thousand springs of life

(139.1-3)

The sun perceptible is now
the spiritual sun, and the earth itself is luminous with the fresh airs of
“sweet Science” sweeping away the stale atmosphere of binding
“dark Religions” (139.10).
begin page 86 |
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The Four Zoas, p. 27 (detail).
London, British Museum.

Print Edition

Publisher

Department of English, University of New Mexico

Albuquerque, NM, USA

Editors

Morris Eaves

Morton D. Paley

Editorial Assistant in Charge

Lynn Goldstein

Cynthia Lewiecki

Bibliographer

Thomas Minnick

Special Design and Pasteup for this issue

David Anderson

Kris Lackey

Associate Editor for Great Britain

Frances A. Carey

Contributors

David V. Erdman

Everett Frost

Nelson Hilton

Terrence Hoagwood

Mary Lynn Johnson

John Kilgore

Mark Lefebvre

Andrew Lincoln

Cettina Magno

Thomas Minnick

Jeffry Spencer

Brian Wilkie

Andrew Wilton

Digital Edition

Editors:

Morris Eaves, University of Rochester

Robert Essick, University of California, Riverside

Joseph Viscomi, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Project Manager

Joe Fletcher

Technical Editor

Michael Fox

Previous Project Manager and Technical Editor

William Shaw

Project Director

Adam McCune

Project Coordinator, UNC:

Natasha Smith, Carolina Digital Library and Archives

Project Coordinator, University of Rochester:

Sarah Jones

Scanning:

UNC Digital Production Center

XML Encoding:

Apex CoVantage

Additional Transcription:

Adam McCune

Jennifer Park

Emendations:

Rachael Isom

Mary Learner

Adam McCune

Ashley Reed

Jennifer Park

Scott Robinson

XSLT Development:

Adam McCune

Joseph Ryan

William Shaw

PHP and Solr Development:

Michael Fox

Adam McCune

Project Assistants:

Lauren Cameron,

Rachael Isom,

Mary Learner,

Jennifer Park,

Ashley Reed,

Adair Rispoli,

Scott Robinson

Sponsors

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
and the University of Rochester